imitation factor of a shotgun roar in an enclosed space is pretty potent
Are you willing to bet your life on that? Or would you rather stack the odds as heavily in your favor as you can?
HelixDab2
joined 1 year ago
How many people are entering the house?
In this case, it was three armed home intruders, plus a getaway driver.
Are they all Jason Bourne like fanatics who are willing to commit suicide in the process of killing you?
If they are, then you have done something seriously horrific and they are most likely justified in seeking your end.
...That's quite a stretch, don't you think? Bluntly, if anyone breaks into my home while I'm home, I'm going to assume that they're intent on causing harm to me, because I'm sure as shit not going to politely ask them to fill out a questionnaire before acting.
To add to this - it's modular because there's a US military specification for it. As long as parts are to spec, they're interchangeable. If I wreck my barrel, any AR-15 barrel (...that uses the same length of gas system...) should bolt on to my receiver. If I break my bolt carrier, any bold carrier should work. If the length of pull on a fixed stock isn't good, I can get an adjustable stock.
'Building' an AR-15 from parts is only slightly harder and more expensive than building Star Wars Lego (tm) kits. A bod-standard milspec AR-15 that's reliable and accurate enough (3 MOA) can be had for about $450.
And, BTW, @Schadrach is absolutely right about it being a common hunting rifle. .223 Rem is commonly used for medium sized game and varmints; it's commonly used for coyotes and feral pigs, and some people (depending on your state) use it for deer with heavier, 70-odd grain bullets.
Yes, it absolutely is. The only people suggesting that it's not are fudds. At home-invasion distances, there is no effective spread on your pellets; your shotgun pattern is a single hole. That means that, yes, you need to put that shotgun to your shoulder, and you need to aim. Given that--outside of box mag fed shotguns--you get 8 shots or less in that shotgun, you better hope that you're a really good shot when someone else is actively shooting back.
You know that the alternative in WWI was a bolt-action battle rifle, right? A pump or lever gun would have been far faster. The sturmgewehr StG-44 wasn't invented until 1943; if it had been in existence in 1914, the Germans absolutely would have been using them in trench battles over. As it was, the Bergmann MP 18--the first real submachine gun, fielded in 1918, near the end of the war--gave a significant advantage in trench combat. (But by the time it hit front line troops, there wasn't anything that could have stopped Germany from losing.)
Have you ever fired a gun while under time pressure? Like, for instance, in a 3 gun competition? Or shot at someone while they're shooting at you? Misses in combat are common. Would you rather miss a lot with a firearm that only carries 7 bullets, or one that has 30?
Oh, and before you spread some fudd about shotguns pellets spreading and not needing to aim, at home defense distances--<10y--your shot pattern with no choke on a 30" barrel with 00 buckshot is going to be about 4". Firing a shotgun without it being braced on your shoulder? Good fucking luck hitting anything. And your shotgun is still going to be about half again as long-at a minimum--than a carbine.
55gr FMJ BT--which is pretty much the most common .223 ammunition--tends to fragment pretty dramatically inside about 300y after hitting something solid. Once it hits something solid, it starts tumbling and tears itself apart pretty fast, in part because it's moving at supersonic speeds. That's part of the reason why it's so lethal at short ranges; it's turning into a lot of small fragments.. (That, and the cavitation that is produced by bullets moving >2600fps; that will produce a temporary wound cavity that exceeds the elasticity of tissue, and turns into a permanent wound cavity. The cavitation produced by subsonic bullets isn't great enough to turn into a permanent wound channel.) At subsonic speeds, it doesn't fragment, and just 'ice picks'. A shotgun with birdshot would definitely not over penetrate, but then you run the risk of not being adequately lethal on your target. Buckshot is still going to penetrate exterior walls pretty handily without being deformed significantly or fragmenting, even if a lot of the energy has been eaten up by a house's cladding; it might not kill easily, but it can still wound. But then you're back to the original problem: large/long firearm, heavy recoil, very limited ammunition in a tube magazine, and slow to reload.
Huh. Didn't know that entirely ending the war on drugs was on the ballot anywhere.
That's simply not correct. Every state is guaranteed at least one house rep, but aside from that it's population based. That's why the census is such a big deal; it reapportions representatives. The less-populated states that lean heavily to the right get very, very few representatives, while much more heavily populated states get many, many more representatives. California currently has 53 house representatives; South Dakota has one.
A much bigger issue is partisan gerrymandering. Even after representatives are apportioned, the state creates the districts. If the state legislature is controlled by Republicans, they'll create voting districts that limits the ability of Democratic--largely urban--voters to select representatives of their choice. The result is that a state like mine has very few Democratic representatives for the state, despite being very purple.
And, BTW, this goes both ways. The rural parts of California skew very conservative, and yet Republicans get very few house seats (and are a superminority in the California legislature). In Texas, major metro areas like Austin, Dallas, and Ft. Worth all skew Democratic, and yet Texas has very, very few Democratic house seats. If redistricting was done by an expert system based solely on number of voters and compact, contiguous districts--with no other information given to the program so that it couldn't account for demographics like race, wealth, partisan lean, etc.---you'd likely see very, very different results in the house of representatives.
Would anyone you know tell you if they carried a knife for self-defense, given that it's generally a crime to do so in the UK?
Al least once. I'd have to dig up the article, but somewhere in one of the flat states (Kansas, I think?), a group of three armed people broke into a home that a teen was home at. He confronted and shot all of the robbers with an AR-15. I believe that two died on the scene, one made it out to the getaway car and bled to death in the car. The driver of the car was charged with three counts of felony murder.
AR-15 carbines and SBRs are very, very good for home defense, far better than a shotgun (long/unwieldy, low ammunition capacity) or handgun (poor sight radius, more difficult to aim), and the small, light bullet tends to not overpenetrate (e.g., you're less likely to accidentally shoot your neighbors than you might be with a larger, heavier bullet).
as for the sign… the people who actually made the sign don’t give a flying rat’s ass what’s on it.
Pre-press is part of my job. I care about the quality of the art and whether or not the text prints correctly. I send a proof to the client after I've checked those thing, and they verify that the text, etc. is correct, that we have the correct size, material, and so on. If someone sends me artwork that's going to end up printing at 26dpi, then I'm going to let them know that it's going to look bad. If they send raster text that they've blown up 5x and is all bitmappy, I'm gonna let them know that they need to fix that.
If the text is in Latin rather than Spanish? Not my concern.
Disagree on VR, depending. I use a VR dry fire training system, and it's def. improved my real-world shooting.